A MIDNIGHT SUN'S DREAM Comes to Norwegian National Ballet This Month

A Midnight Sun's Dream - it might be reminiscent of something you've heard before? This new ballet is inspired by Shakespeare's most popular play, but the story is simplified. While A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place through a day in the forests outside Athens, the National Ballet's A Midnight Sun's Dream takes place on the roof of our own opera.

From summer dream to climate nightmare

We follow the gods Oberon and Titania and four young people throughout the year - from bluish darkness through melting landscapes to summer and a sun that never sets. It is winter when the gods meet the young people in love in the forest for the first time. As the seasons go by, the young people get closer to who they really are. At the same time, the gods are confused: Why is the whole nature out of balance, making the seasons unrecognizable?

In the changing of the seasons, there is a constant longing toward what is to come. We dream of summer, sun and times without obligations - but what happens when we get too much of what we want? When the lack of snow makes the winter unbearably dark, while the summer become unbearably hot? The road from a dream to a nightmare is often quite short.

Between magnificent ballet and a play

Marit Moum Aune is director-in-recidence of the Norwegian National Ballet and is behind some of the company's biggest successes: Ibsen's Ghosts and Hedda Gabler . She made the latter together with Kaloyan Boyadjiev, as she does now. While Moum Aune has background from theater, Boyadjiev - who created our version of The Nutcracker - was one of the Norwegian National Ballet's greatest dancers and choreographs with a distinctively modern, classically based language of movement. When the two of them work together again, the result is what Moum Aune calls "a mixture of magnificent ballet and a play".

Peter Baden weaves together Felix Mendelssohn's famous Midsummer Night's Dream tones with other classical and new, self-composed music. Even Børsum, one of Norway's foremost scenographers, transforms the opera roof into a cornucopia of a changing natural landscape - and it is here that the Norwegian National Ballet steps in with their virtuoso dance. The roles as the gods Titania and Oberon are danced by Grete Sofie Borud Nybakken, Whitney Jensen, Shaakir Muhammad and Ricardo Castellanos in alternation.

Performances run June 9-19, 2022. Learn more at

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